The effect of Meltdown and Spectre in our communities

Solaris x86 started out with user space being visible to the kernel, and people used that. To create bugs, as it happened. We later took that mapping out, and required the older, slower and more paranoid mechanisms be used.

Then we improved them so they stayed paranoid, but ran rather quickly. That gave us a smaller threat surface, making it somewhat harder to invent mealtdown-like explots withoout ever having to predict meltdown as a possible attack.

Didn't help with spectre, of course, but then only the Multicians worried about that kind of covert channel. Too bad!